The Fascist Roots of the American Left

In 1925 the Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing spoke out against the repressive political climate of Weimar Germany.

Although Lessing’s explicit target was the cravenness of the Weimar regime of Paul von Hindenburg, his real target was the emerging power of Nazism, and he blamed the government for yielding to it.

The Nazis recognized immediately the threat posed by Lessing. Adolf Hitler youth at Lessing’s University of Hanover formed a “committee against Lessing.” They encouraged students to boycott his lectures.

Nazi youth then showed up and disrupted Lessing’s classes. Lessing was forced to give up his academic chair the following year.

In his account of what happened, Lessing later wrote that he could do nothing to prevent being “shouted down, threatened and denigrated” by student activists.

He was helpless, he said, “against the murderous bellowing of youngsters who accept no individual responsibilities but pose as spokesman for a group or an impersonal ideal, always talking in the royal ‘we’ while hurling personal insults … and claiming that everything is happening in the name of what’s true, good and beautiful.”

This was fascism, German style, in the 1920s.

In March 2017, the eminent political scientist Charles Murray showed up to give a lecture on class divisions in American society at a progressive bastion, Middlebury College in Vermont.

Hundreds of protesters who deemed themselves “anti-fascists” gathered outside McCullough Student Center where Murray was scheduled to speak and engage in dialog with Middlebury political scientist Allison Stanger.

Murray is a libertarian who leans Republican, although he’s no fan of President Donald Trump. Unlike Lessing, who taught at the university where he was harassed, Murray doesn’t teach at Middlebury, which is virtually devoid of conservative faculty.

(Stanger is a moderate Democrat affiliated with the New America Foundation.)

In any event, the discussion promised to be a scholarly and illuminating one, giving students a perspective that they never get. But the Middlebury protesters were having none of it.

The activists confronted Murray and Stanger, and at one point they struck Stanger. Inside Wilson Hall, protesters turned their backs to Murray and began to boo and shout epithets like “racist” and “Nazi.”

Murray found he simply could not be heard. College officials escorted Murray and Stanger to another location where their conversation had, for safety reasons, to be shown on closed-circuit television.

After the event, according to Middlebury spokesman Bill Burger, Murray and Stanger were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protesters.” The protesters were masked in the standard Antifa style.

Murray and Stanger ducked into an administrator’s car, but the protesters attacked the car, pounding on it rocking it, and seeking to prevent it from leaving.

“At one point,” Burger said, “a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.”

According to Burger, “During the confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck. She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and is wearing a neck brace.”

Murray praised campus security officers for the protection they provided but described what he experienced as “scary, violent mob action.”

This is so-called progressive anti-fascism, American style, circa 2017.

Why does this purported anti-fascism on the part of progressives so closely resemble the fascism that it claims to be opposing? More profoundly, what is “anti-fascism” as the term is now used on the American left?

To answer these questions, we turn to the founders of the so-called anti-fascist movement on the progressive left, the sociologist Herbert Marcuse of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Much has been written about the Frankfurt School and its leading intellectuals, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and most of all Marcuse.

These mostly-lionized accounts stress that the Frankfurt group was made up of refugees from Nazi Germany, Jews fleeing the prospect of Holocaust. Consequently, the credibility of these men in formulating an anti-fascist doctrine has gone largely unquestioned.

In reality, the Frankfurt School’s relationship to Nazism is much more complicated. Marcuse, for instance, was a student and devotee of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Heidegger was a lifelong anti-Semite and member of the Nazi Party who championed Hitler’s rise to power.

Heidegger viewed his entire philosophy as laying the foundation for the “blood and soil” doctrines of Nazism. Even after the war, Heidegger refused to condemn Nazi atrocities.

Marcuse did break with Heidegger and flee Germany, but the break was entirely over the issue of anti-Semitism and the personal danger that Hitler’s policies posed for Jews in general and Marcuse in particular.

Marcuse never repudiated Heidegger’s philosophy, and a good deal of his own early work has been described as attempting a reconciliation between Heidegger’s thought and that of Marx. Heidegger viewed Marx as the pioneer leftist of...

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